Quick innovation

Brain Reactions is a small web tool but does amazing things in a very simple way. Yesterday I become aware I missed to look more closely into it.

It creates, enhance and impoves quality of user inputed ideas. Brainstorming sessions, you know.

Shortly, create an idea in 3 seconds, invite people to come and add their 2 cents to it ( or they'll come from aggregated page ) , later rank those ideas and you get nice idea pool generated by users and the best ideas on top.

Nice way to get ideas, advice and answers , but there's need to be network effect ( critical mass of users when offered as web service ) to make it really useful.

Otherwise, If you do it on the intranet, it could work without these effects and be great way for product evolution.

User interface and navigation is very simple and straightforward. Ideas could be very easly organized into categories and labels ( or even tags ).
Many other add-ons are possible and could be created on top of basic functionality like user's statistics etc.

BETA web services from The Museum

The world of permanent beta services on the web aggregated and called The Museum of Modern Betas. Nice try :)
''About'' page says

The MoMB is a site dedicated to listing web-based applications on a beta trip.

Interesting article wrote Dario about the Web. Congrats Dario, you really nice summed up what's going on.

Check this betas when you'll got time. Some of them could be inspiring for small modules on our project.

Podzinger looks promising audio search

Podzinger is the first search engine with right approach to finding audio/podcasts files via keywords, IMHO. Powered by BBS ( company made first router ever, pioneered VOIP etc.) speech-to-text technology and you can either listen to the full podcast/audio file, or click on the time indicator to fast-forward to just the piece containing your keyword.

That's cool. Up to the point you want listen. That's users control and brings value to this type of search engine.
Take radio shows and other content for example.
With every keyword and little help of RSS you can make your playlist of spoken words and phrases and track it. Just like with Techorati you can do the same for audio, at least in theory.
I see many other services are possible for data retrieval with this approach of mining audio data on the web.

It could really make an easy way for marketers to find ''niche'' audience with Long tail approach.
Podzinger has obviouse intentions with sponsored search in the future. It's still in beta.

Web audio production could have instant benefit , and search engines will be your FM or AM at the end of day ;)) Remember promise of on-demand content ?

Croatian VIDI Web Awards

Sad day for croatian Web. The ceremony of VIDI web Awards is fiasco. I just checked who are this year's winners and I couldn't disagree more ( ...with some of them, but selection in general is poor, or is it choice ? ).

Is it just me or...No wonder, the jurry was consisted of journalist that are not so much web savvy and follow the recent trends.
Oh my, have they failed to select winners in news category, to mentioned only one gig.

My friend from Zagreb told me, some people in the today's ceremony expressed deep dissapointment over these awards and organisers are telling this is the last time for VIDI Croatian Web Awards. Namely, they are too costly.
Or I would add, not representative !

Amazon inovates search engine industry

I am amazed by the innovativeness of Amazon's subsidiary Alexa. They released Alexa Web Crawl which enables ordinary people or startups to build their own powerfull search engines for very little money.
Wired and BBC got the story fast.

Something BIG is coming to search industry. It could have far-reaching effects for many businesses on the web.

Alexa claims that developers, students and startups will be given inexpensive access to an industrial-scale web crawler -- the same technology used by industry giants like Yahoo (Yahoo Slurp) and Google (Googlebot).

Amazon is doing very innovative stuff, indeed. Last month they opened beta version of Mechanical Turk which could bring some other implication for the web with ''webshoring''.

Who would expect Amazon will go into all this ?
Case study for Alexa Web Crawl is Musipedia, an interesting search engine where you can search melodies whisperin or playing short samles of music.

MSN Search to pay users

Bill Gates makes bold statement , according to Wall Street Journal ( Via Netzeitung ).
He said that they will earnings from search engines ads share with users. No details are given.

Finally, my source is german web news site. My resolution for new year will be to get back closer to german language and read it everyday.
My first foreign langugage is german, not english.

Speed of light in the city

Nice to see how's the feeling of traveling with the speed of light. Impossible, but still simulated in the lab.
Look at this tour through the streets of german city Tubingen.

The future of HTML

Ed Dumbill from IBM wrote about the future of HTML . His view is that HTML is not very good language for building web pages. At least the best we have at this moment.
There was a progress...

HTML's ease of learning and the view source capability for browsers has bootstrapped the Web's popularity in an amazing way. The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) involvement in standardizing HTML has ensured that Web browsers all implement the same dialect, more or less. The emergence of CSS, and the corresponding growth of standards-based Web design as best practice has also averted HTML chaos and led to a better Web experience for users and developers alike.

As I understand, the point is making user interface more dynamic and enabling browsers to more closely work with web based apps and systems making seemless experience.

Ajax method is only one solution, but as Ed states, it's not standardized. Browsere vendors ( like Mozilla and Opera ) are wanting more. Their proposition is HTML5 or Web Application 1.0 and Web Forms 2.

Many of these future enhancements are already , at least conceptualy, in use on the web with JavaScript combinations.

W3C has the ball to bless.

Quick fix

Installed JustBlogIt .
Blogging from Firefox's right click. It's faster for quick writing.
W.Bloggar is doing trouble on my system so I stopped using it.

Old speak

I disagree.
Lurking Loic's wiki about the event in Paris ; LesBlogs conference.

Did I said that I disagree ?
Here's what I read in the main session of the wiki, and I'll be short in my comments:

* definition: what is this new state of mind ?
* How does it challenge the corporate world ?
* How does it change the media landscape ?
* How does it bring more democracy in politics ?
* How does education evolve ?
* What are the tools used and how we can all best benefit from them
* Where we are going in the near and longer term future
* the_european_blogosphere a collaborative work from 50+ bloggers to describe the
European Blogosphere and best cases
* european_startups_and_initiatives around Web 2.0 and social software

New state of mind ? As a long time blogger I can't see that. Do you ?

Challenge corporate world ? Who ? Blogs ? C'mon, I don't buy it. We are corporate world, we want ''wage per hour'', and have time for our hobby- blogging ;) I certanly need that time - more ( lately , busy-blogging ).
It will change PR practices from time to time, and make corporate faces more responsive and open, but in the crisis, they will hit you with common PR speak.

Change media ? Slow, but not blogs ( and other interactive web forms, I'll be damned, I'll write to state that as such, not alone blogs... )
The current media companies are clueless, applying old media strategies looking to find new dynamics, and my thought is that they will find that and make it ''theirs''. Yes, yes, no more ''we the media'', it'll be natural. Murdoch knows that new strategy, and soon it'll have econonomy of scale in attention economy of new born media consuption.

Democracy ? No, but self-serving groups, and interest groups- yes. We still lack of seriouse integration of social software and public sector.
I often see how many in the western world don't realize the difference between public and privat sector. They are preaching about social software from private sector perspective, which is nice for building apps and infrustructure but completly mission impossable for real tasks and needs of the citizens.

Education evolve ?
Yes, it is evolving, I use blogs, podcasts, reading RSS english feeds and learn english I wouldn't otherwise ;))

European start up activity is dead. Be honest. We have immitators, clones and wholesales distributors. There's very little technology inovation. Maybe we should look at Eastern Europe start ups.

Now, that would be something.
Hidden web is just around your european corner ;))

Bonus conference tip, very amusing article over at Robert's blog about Mena's corporate speak :))
Maybe we are all assholes. Or at least, we deserved to be called like that :)